McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
Join us for a lecture by Prof. Amara Solari (Penn State University), a Guggenheim Fellow and UCSB alumnus. In the first years of the seventeenth century, small waves of Franciscan friars fanned northward from central Mexico to convert the Rio Grande Basin's Indigenous Pueblo community to Catholicism. When the friars embarked on their Christianizing campaign, they did so equipped with more than a century of Amerindian missionary experience under their belts. And yet, when these friars and forced Indigenous laborers completed their monumental missions, they adopted an innovative visual aesthetic for the complexes' interiors, the intermedial representation of tin-glazed earthenware tiles rendered in polychromatic mineral-based pigments and affixed selenite tesserae. This talk will interrogate this visual strategy, linking this seemingly trivial aesthetic choice to the ultimate failure of the Franciscan campaign.
This event is organized by the Department of History of Art and Architecture and co-sponsored by the Virgil Cordano OFM Endowed Chair in Catholic Studies, Department of Religious Studies, Center for Latin American & Iberian Research (CLAIR), Department of Anthropology, Department of History, and and the American Indian & Indigenous Studies (AIIS) Program.